How to Write an American Symphony:

Amy Beach and the birth of
"Gaelic" Symphony

In
1894, Amy Beach (1867-1944) began work on her Symphony in E-minor,
("Gaelic"), completing it in 1896. Four of the symphony's
themes are traditional Irish-Gaelic melodies, hence the designation,
"Gaelic." In choosing Irish music, Beach tapped into a rich
heritage that had been part of the American musical mainstream for at
least a century, and by the 1890s, was assimilated into the new genre
called popular music.

Beach, who signed all her music "Mrs. H. H. A. Beach," was
the youngest member of the Boston composers' group, the country's
first school of art music. Born Amy Marcy Cheney in the small town of
Henniker, New Hampshire, at age four she began playing piano and
composing. The family relocated to Boston in 1875, where she made her
piano debut at sixteen, playing Moscheles Piano Concerto in G minor
with orchestra. Critics found her musicianship and technical
equipment superb. At her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in
1885, she earned glowing reviews for her performance of Chopin's
F-minor Concerto .

Equally gifted in composition, her first big success came when
Boston's Handel and Haydn Society gave the premiere of her Mass in
E-flat, op. 5, a 75-minute work for solo quartet, chorus, organ, and
orchestra. The premiere of the "Gaelic" Symphony, on 30
October 1896 was given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was now
"one of the boys," or so composer George Whitefield
Chadwick wrote, signaling acceptance by the established Boston
composers: men were symphonists, not women.

Headlines celebrated the work as the first symphony by an American
woman, stressing her gender but ignoring any nationalist
implications. No critic declared it an American work; yet it fit one
contemporary definition of a nationalist work, that it draw on the
music of any ethnic group in the United States.

European composers--deFalla in Spain, Grieg in Norway, the Russian
"five," Debussy and D'Indy in France, and Smetana and
Dvorák in Bohemia--were borrowing from their ethnic musics to
create separate and distinct national styles. The issue of cultural
independence from the dominant Austro-German school surfaced late in
the United States. By 1896, however, with manifest destiny realized
in the conquest of the west, Americans had a new sense of national
identity, together with pride in its democratic traditions, and in
its industrial and military power. The next goal, some believed, was
American cultural autonomy.

Antonín
Dvovák would, with the death of Brahms in 1897, inherit the
master's mantle as the leading European symphonist as well as a Czech
nationalist composer.. To Jeanette Thurber, the organizer and patron
of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, Dvorák
was the ideal person to encourage the creation of an
American-sounding concert music. She invited him to serve as Director
of the Conservatory and its teacher of composition. The composer, who
arrived in September, 1892, and stayed until '95, took both
assignments seriously. Eight months after settling in New York,
Dvorák named his preferred source for an "American"
concert music, telling the press that American composers could find
every emotion and mood in the melodies of African-Americans,
specifying plantation songs (i.e., spirituals and work songs) and
minstrel show music.

The Boston Herald asked its leading composers to respond to
Dvorák's statement. John Knowles Paine, trained in Germany and
the first professor of music at Harvard, rejected Dvorák's
idea, seeing no need for nationalist music. George Whitefield
Chadwick and Arthur Foote agreed with Paine, although in practice
they wrote a number of compositions influenced by Irish and Scottish
music. Amy Beach, the youngest of the group, noted that, over the
centuries, vernacular music had reinvigorated art music, and agreed
with Dvorák about the need for a distinctive American music
based on ethnic and traditional idioms. She disagreed, however, with
Dvorák's recommendation because of her lack of familiarity
with black music. She wrote: "We of the North should be far more
likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs,
inherited with our literature from our ancestors." By her choice
of themes for her "Gaelic" Symphony, she was following her
own advice. Furthermore, she wrote that the symphony had a
program--the sufferings and struggles of the Irish people, "their
laments...their romance, and their dreams."

Beach's decision was more defensible than she might have realized.
Irish songs entered into the American musical mainstream in 1808 with
the publication of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies in 1808; many
editions followed. Throughout the nineteenth century, Moore's songs
could be heard in middle-class parlors and on theater and concert
stages across the nation. Among the favorites were "Believe me,
if all those endearing young charms," "The Minstrel
Boy," and "The Last Rose of Summer."

The songs of Stephen Foster soon rivaled Moore's in popularity.
Foster, himself of Irish descent, incorporated Irish musical
characteristics into his songs: "Ah, May the Red Rose Live
Alway," as well as "Gentle Annie," and the famous
"Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" all have a Gaelic lilt
to them. Foster also composed songs and fiddle-tunes for black-face
minstrel shows. In addition, many actors and writers for the musical
theater were themselves Irish, played Irish characters, and sang
Irish-inspired music. The most famous was the late nineteenth century
team of Harrigan and Hart, whose realist plays--with music-- held a
mirror to the Irish poor of New York. As a result, Irish music
crossed class and ethnic boundaries, to become familiar to much of
the population.

Amy Beach, who believed that the older the tunes, the more authentic,
found her source for the symphony in a collection published in 1841
by a folk-song collector in Dublin. A lively fiddle tune appears as
the closing theme of the first movement, orchestrated to recall the
chanter and drone of the bagpipe. The first and second themes,
however, are Beach's own, borrowed from her turbulent sea song,
"Dark is the Night," op.11 no. 1. The monothematic second
movement has as its theme a Gaelic love song, first presented as an
oboe solo, next by the full woodwind choir, and repeated by strings.
For the middle section of this movement, Beach transformed the same
love song into a fast, perpetually moving, theme that recalls the
scintillating scherzos of Mendelssohn. Two Irish songs, one a paean
to Ireland's natural beauty, the other a lament for a dead child, are
the themes of the third movement, the two melodies varied, developed,
and combined. Beach wrote that the original themes she composed for
the Finale are Irish in style. Their dance-like rhythms, large leaps,
and soaring melodies bring this generously-proportioned symphony to
an energetic close.

The
symphony had a sturdy performance life following its premiere: the
Boston Symphony Orchestra gave it twice in Boston, and once each in
Brooklyn and New York, and orchestras across the country and in
Germany followed. The work was a watershed for Beach, who thereafter
used vernacular melodies--especially Irish and Scottish-- as themes
in about thirty of her three hundred compositions. Neglected after
Beach's death, the symphony has made a recent comeback. Its
performance on 9 January 2000 on the American Composers Orchestra's
"Roots" concert reaffirms the "Gaelic" Symphony's
importance as an early nationalist composition by a pioneer in the
development of an "American" music

--Adrienne Fried Block, 1999

Block's biography, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and
Work of an American Composer (Oxford University Press, 1998) has just
won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.